Making the world safe for Messiaen, thuribles, and realist metaphysics.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

This post will not change the world

Blogging occasionally gets labelled as a "stream-of-consciousness" medium, a direct link from our head to your screen, but this is profoundly misleading. If your brain is anything like mine, thoughts bounce around at breakneck speed, totally unimpeded by the limitations of grammar and logical sense. And so we pick out the few thoughts that make sense, dress them up with subjects and predicates and send them out for worldwide consumption. The rest of our thought process is untranslatable - random ideas, white noise, and whatever misfiring synapse that kept making me think of the Glaucoma Hymn whenever I tried to concentrate on anything else. Listen to it, I dare you!

I suppose this is what comes of too much commuting between cities and not enough sleep. By this evening, the only thing I was fit for was staring out a train window and humming "Glaucoma, glaucoma, constricting vision slowly" to myself. Not even the enticements of an Anthony Powell novel could persuade my tired brain to concentrate on anything. Still, it was a successful week of playing, with a good showing in a competition this afternoon and a successful performance (reviewed here) of the Malcolm Williamson organ symphony.

Tomorrow is Pentecost, of course, which requires several important liturgical adjustments, the most important of which is writing on the white board with red markers rather than blue at choir practice. (Theoretically the liturgical colour for the Easter season is white, not blue, but I was unable to find any white dry erase markers!) And you'll be pleased to know that my tradition of enlivening my music lists with silly conceits (as reported here and here) is still going strong; today's theme is "Twentieth-Century 'Veni Creator' Settings By Composers Whose Last Names Begin With 'L' Week"*. I'm confident that this idea will be accepted with enthusiasm by the congregation; every time I play modernist voluntaries, I notice an extra spring in their step as they hurry downstairs to coffee hour.